The 10 Dishes That Made My Career: Blaine Wetzel of Willows Inn

The former NOMA understudy reflects on the dishes that inspired his world-class restaurant on a tiny, remote island in the Pacific Northwest.

Naomi Tomky

Photos: Charity Burggraaf

Making a name for yourself as a young, brilliant chef is never easy. Doing it from a tiny and remote island in the far northwest of the country is nearly impossible. And yet, when Blaine Wetzel looked for a way to move back to his home region after spending time in René Redzepi's kitchen at Noma, he landed on Lummi Island.

While Noma imbued Wetzel with its famous foraging-first philosophy and New Nordic aesthetic, Redzepi practiced it from Copenhagen, a city of more than half-a-million people. Wetzel now cooks on an island of about 1,000 people, an environment with its own set of limitations that's perhaps the closest anyone has come to re-creating a NOMA-like experience here in the States. "There are no deliveries," he says, of the unique challenges. "Everywhere else you check the fridge. Here you check the farm." The limitations, he says, force him to be more creative with what people here make, grow, or catch on the island, to keep in close touch with what's in season at any given time.

Willows Inn, where Wetzel started six years ago, at age 24, closes each winter, re-opening with the first flower buds in spring. "This time of year you have a lot of wild foods that you can't get if you're a chef in New York, or even in Seattle. Perennial herbs are coming up quite a bit, different shoots, beach plants. Hundreds of wild foods. Bright green shoots emerging from the ground here. Spring." In his second year, The New York Times named Willows Inn one of ten restaurants "worth a plane ride." By 2014, the James Beard Foundation named him Rising Star Chef (he had been nominated in 2011 as well), and the following year he received the award for Best Chef: Northwest.

Wetzel now cooks on an island of about 1,000 people. "There are no deliveries," he says.

But the restaurant is—physically and philosophically—a world away from those awards. From Seattle, it requires an hour-and-a-half drive followed by a quick ride on a very tiny ferry to get to the island, half of which is Lummi Indian tribal land. The tribe, which has for generations been fishing there and eating the same wild foods Wetzel uses, influences some of the cooking and supplies much of the fish. Other chefs might know their fish vendor; Wetzel meets his at the dock to pick up that day's catch. "They brought in two coolers of rockfish the other day," he says. "And of the 20 to 30 fish, there were only two of any one kind. Seeing all the different types of fish really gets me going."

As this season begins to ramp up, Wetzel is excited about a new fishery in the area featuring dime-sized pink scallops. "We stay in close touch with the garden, wild plants, the fishermen," he says. "We adapt more than a lot of restaurants. It makes us a bit more of who we are."

Here are the ten dishes that shaped Blaine Wetzel's career.

Pacific Northwest oysters

Photo courtesy Naomi Tomky

I grew up in this area. I didn't really realize it at the time, but looking back now, I ate a lot more fish and shellfish than someone growing up in another part of the country, or [even] in a different family. We lived next to an oyster farm, and my family was interested in cooking fish and shellfish quite a bit. [So] I ate oysters a lot as a kid.

Raw scallops at L'Arpége (Paris, France)

Photo: theinsatiablepalate.wordpress

Fairly early on in my career, I ate at [Alain Passard's] L'Arpége. I got the chef's signature dish: scallops served in raw, marinated slices. I'd read about that recipe so many times, and the chef was so famous, so I was excited to get the dish. Then tasting it—it was so good. It was inspirational to taste his mastery after doing this same dish for so long. The genius of doing a signature dish so well, for such an extended time—that's impressive.

Pippa fire-roasted squash at Saison (San Francisco)

Photo: Flickr/T.Tseng

More recently, I was really inspired by this dish I had at Saison. It [featured] a type of squash I'd never had before. The texture of it was cool. It was encouraging to remember there are so many different ingredients I've never had before, and they can be so delicious. It makes me want to dive deeper into the things we have here.

Roasted pork with ransoms at Noma (Copenhagen, Denmark)

Photo: Flickr/paz.ca

From my time at Noma, I really took away the overall philosophy of the restaurant, the attention to detail, and extreme creativity. That informed a variety of dishes, but the pork dish with wild garlic is just so simple. Roasted pork in a sauce made from the ransoms—just the fresh juice of these wild garlic leaves—and then a few of the ransom leaves, quickly cooked, on top. A little bit of burnt cucumber with it, too. That dish helped me determine how I wanted to cook: simply, with great ingredients, not too much embellishment. On the menu at Noma at the time, it was all great dishes in a variety of styles, and I tended toward a very straightforward type of dish that was just three ingredients. [That way] you really get the flavor of each ingredient.

Lummi Island smoked salmon

Photo: Charity Burggraaf

What makes the salmon stand apart is a variety of little subtleties. The fish is all from right here on Lummi Island, and it's caught in the native fashion using reef nets. It's really high-quality salmon, the best Sockeye salmon you can get, because of how it's treated and how it's fished. In this area, there's a traditional style of smokehouse, and Willows Inn has one of those.

Growing up in Olympia, I had quite a bit of smoked salmon, but having it here for the first time was unlike anything I'd had before. We dive into the details: the sourcing of the wood for the smoking, how the fish is prepared, cured, and dried. Then it's about flavoring and glazing it. It just melts in your mouth—a real dense flake and soft texture. It's amazingly flavorful, with subtle smoke.

Willows Inn toasted kale

Photo: Charity Burggraaf

It's something of a signature dish. I don't have, like, a Daniel Boulud burger or anything. [But] a toasted kale leaf with a puree of local black truffles and bits of crumbled rye bread is a really good example of a classic dish here. The crunchy texture and earthy flavor make them very good with the local cider before the meal begins. Many people come back for it. The menu has evolved since we started making this; the dishes are more reflective of where we are now and where our style is going.

Willows Inn bread service

Photo: Flickr/T.Tseng

People mention our bread service a lot. It's a whole-wheat bread made with flour from Winthrop, [using] winter red wheat that they grow. I've found it to be the most flavorful wheat, period. Their mill is really good; you really taste the grain.

We have been doing the one recipe for bread in the same oven, every day, for the last six years. We don't use any commercial yeast, so it takes about three days. Then we make cultured cream and we make our own butter. We serve pan drippings from the roasted chicken to dip the bread into, and it's so satisfying.

Crisp rutabaga torta with oyster sauce

Photo: Charity Burggraaf

When we re-open each year, we have a totally new menu because we source all our ingredients here. [So] we end up with none of the same stuff as the previous season. It's always an insane time to get started. This year, I think it was a real focus on exploring ingredients—exploring tastes, textures, and ingredients that are more challenging in terms of how they're cooked and what they are. For someone eating here, it makes it even more of an experience because they've just had 20 new ingredients in a row that they've never heard of, or haven't eaten in that way. We're focusing on underscoring these perennial greens that are a highlight of the season right now. In the garden it's just the beginning of spring, so there are wild shoots, greens, and leaves that are the theme of the menu. We try to include some element to each dish that has that flavor in it, so we can showcase that through the whole menu. This year, we’ve started serving a rutabaga leaf with a sauce of oysters, and it demonstrates our style this season. It’s showered with wild ferns and different pine shoots. You kind of eat it like a flatbread torta, but it's this super green version of it. It's kind of a very in your face, as far as what's in season right now.

Pork terrine in Paraguay

Photo: Flickr/[puamelia]

Visiting Paraguay, you [see] a whole different variety of foods [with] totally different flavors—things I've never thought of. There's one dish I've had there quite a few times that I've wanted to incorporate into the menu here, but haven't quite found how to do it yet. It's a dish that's like a pork terrine, but instead of what you might think of in a traditional pork terrine, it's like pork skin. It's simmered and steamed, and then ground. While it's warm, it's tossed with an herb-filled salsa, like a chimichurri, and then that is pressed into a loaf pan, cold. It sets up like a terrine, but it's green and fresh, and a nice texture with the cooked cold pork skin. I think that will, in some way, influence a dish here. Maybe not as a pork-skin terrine, but the idea of the ground pork being tossed with the salsa and served cold could be re-done in a variety of ways.

Squash shoot and wild greens salad

Photo: Flickr/Alan Levine

I gather inspiration everywhere. I was cooking once with a Filipino chef and he prepared a salad for us for lunch, just casually, that was made from squash shoots. He blanched the little tendrils and chopped them a little bit, then topped the salad with some dried squid and shrimp and fish sauce. Another time, while visiting Italy, I had an array of wild greens—dandelion, mustard, and whatnot—that was tossed in olive oil and grilled, then pulled out and wrapped to let it steam for a little while. That got chopped up into a salsa and put over fish. I was like, oh, that's a really awesome way to use those. More than taking inspiration from any one cuisine, it's nice to experience all these different cooking styles and take the techniques that speak to me, the parts that spark my imagination.

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